Wasteland 2: So I'm walking in the valley of the shadow of the mushroom cloud, and the local conflict is between a band of crazy, nuke-worshipping kamikaze monks and a gang of paramilitary creepazoids (who aren't actively crazy but who are also, you know, paramilitary creepazoids). I instantly dislike the monks because they casually inflict collateral damage on the people they're supposed to be protecting, indifferently extend their protection to bandits, and threaten to detonate an ICBM if anyone messes with them; the only good thing they have going for them is that they maintain a functional hospital. But, since I don't exactly have a good track record with outfits calling themselves the [color][animal]Militia, I decide initially that this last point seems to balance things out slightly in the monks' favor. I humor the monks' leader a bit by agreeing to track down and kill a rogue monk who found his own nuke and is trying to activate it for nefarious purposes, then move on to my actual goal on the other side of the valley. I don't formally pick sides just yet because I don't trust either of them and want to see exactly how much Brother Enola is lying to me before making a decision.
So we move on to Damonta, where I'm supposed to to mess with a radio tower so we can find the baddies' HQ. We have the misfortune to arrive in the middle of the robocalypse and our rescue efforts are, uh, a little mixed. I fail to save the water merchants or anyone in the water company building (and I'm curious to know what the deal with Sarah's pendant was now) because I'm distracted elsewhere saving the lesbians (duh). I do save the DJ. I save Red and later give him his share of the Sierra Madre gold (he was pretty helpful shooting down the robots in town). I fail to save Binh, but figure out the gimmick after the boss fight, reload and do it right. So in practice I think I only let like half the town die? As we'll see later, this is somewhat better than my average for this game.
I briefly have a sentient discoball in the party but it proves to possess a very poor sense of self-preservation. I do get a more permanent recruit out of this semi-debacle, though, because in a cage behind the boss is the 41st century definition of the word dictionary (is this a Legion of Super-Heroes reference or something?) He's got metal joints! Decent skill point accrual for a brawler! And he does as much damage with one punch as Takayuki could manage on crits (stabbing robots, how well does that normally work out, right?) He's also freaking Lex Luthor so this is a pretty winning package, the only thing I really have to give up in trading followers is reliable bomb-defusing skill. That's not something I'll need any time soon, right?
My local plot business done, I head north to invade the renegade monk's missile silo and immediately outside the front door is a huge minefield. ffffffffff But okay, this is salvageable, the team lead has enough minor demolitions talent to get us through with the magic of mashing F11. I march inside and unsurprisingly we were completely misled, he just wants to defuse the bomb before his crazy friends get a hold of it. But he isn't up to the task because that sort of heroic risk is entirely the preserve of playable characters. With our measely three ranks in demolition, can we neutralize a nuclear missile?
After exploding the world an embarrassing number of times, yes we can.
This is where it gets great (and later not so great) because the head monk was monitoring the status of the nuke from his own command center and all his flunkies got to witness me disable it in real time. "They killed a god! There is no god!" The transmission cuts off violently and I laugh all the way back to the valley. Then I stop laughing because the firefight following the collapse of authority indiscriminately cut down civilian, doctor, monk, raider scum, etcetera. Some of the militia's hanging around, and you'd think they'd be happy with me because the valley's theirs to tax now, but alas, they wanted it with, you know, actual living people to tax, and they go hostile the moment they see me.
Everybody in the valley is dead solely because I didn't want either party of wackjobs getting their hands on a nuclear missile.
Also I feel it my duty to disclose that the militia officer was carrying a dildo in her inventory at the time of her death. Did I mention this game has weird ideas of what constitutes loot.
The prison's between me and home after this and I have some unfinished business there*. Walk in and see the guards have restocked; the townspeople are not in evidence. Dead or enslaved, I'm sure. The sick woman who begged me to kill her last time and who I didn't because I wanted to try and find a cure is now definitely corpsified (really wondering if there was more to this that I didn't pick up on). The lone civilian I find tells me the militia captain has flown into an insane rage because someone deliberately infected his beloved dogs with plague and then told him we did it. We talk the survivor into admitting yeah, it was him, look here's the cure so maybe you can talk this guy down? I have no intention of even attempting the latter because the guy's a slaving sack of shit, but hey, I can save the dogs, right? I run the massive prison boss fight fight a couple times and just can't get Vax to survive. Goodbye robot buddy, you were very helpful when you weren't shooting me in the back and screaming KILL ALL HUMANS. Anyway, something good should come out of this other than the simple obliteration of awful people, so let's see to those dogs.
They go hostile almost immediately after receiving the cure. I'm not sure if it's because I killed their master or because I have a stunted green abomination toddling along at my side. They're dead in the end either way.
(*The prison turrets are such a mechanically ridiculous means of railroading, by the way. They have four thousand HP. The robot you can activate to suicide against them deals five thousand damage. Failing the demolitions check with the ICBM and detonating it deals only five hundred damage! It would take sixteen nuclear warheads to kill the Night Terror!)
Please let me know if there's some other way we can screw up today. Oh, what's that, Rail Nomad camp? I didn't finish that? Okay, let's see if I can break into the meeting hall this time. ...I can! But the MacGuffin has indeed vanished into the ether. There's no peaceful resolution available any longer. If the chiefs try and talk it out, it'll just descend into violence. I opt to prevent this by massacring Kekkabah and his one-armed bandits because he's the bigger bully. Imperfect solutions, etcetera. This looks like an exit for my team until I take a few steps away and it turns out all Kekkabah's townspeople psychically know he's dead and have gone hostile. They're trying to stab me now so I do the sensible thing and shoot them first. Then someone calls my boss. (He isn't happy.) Fine, fine! I'll stop murdering people and just run for the exit! I bypass the remaining townsfolk and individually move my entire seven-person team towards the exit across this huge and winding town in combat mode, only to be told that I can't exit the town in combat mode. Jesus fuckin' Christ. I reload and manage to sneak out with just one civilian casualty, but still, fuck this town forever.
I'm pretty sure that by now every town in the game has been left unintentionally decimated in my wake. It isn't always me doing the murdering, but results are the same, aren't they? I'm supposed to go to Los Angeles next so I can accidentally disrupt and demolish the social fabric of wholly new communities, but I've a fair amount of work to do on personal projects this week so I'll probably call this a good place to take a break.
